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Interview with Dr. Stephen Braude reveals challenges and opportunities of controversial psi research into mediumship and psychokinesis.
Research into controversial topics like psychic mediums is tough, but some researchers find it’s made even tougher when skeptics favor the weakest cases over the strongest.
Join Skeptiko host Alex Tsakiris for and interview with Professor of Philosophy and psi researcher, Dr. Stephen Braude. During the interview Dr. Braude recounts his entree into psi research, “… there was all this other stuff that had been happening outside the lab from séances and anecdotal reports and I figured if I was an honest intellect I at least needed to become acquainted with it before I rejected it summarily. So I first studied the evidence for large-scale, and physical mediumship in particular. That was a momentous event because the evidence blew me away… I discovered that the evidence was much cleaner than people made it out to be.”
Braude continues, “The usual arguments about the evidence being easily dismissed because of poor observation or poor conditions of observation demonstrated really a lack of command of the evidence. One of the things that struck me was that people were dismissing the non-experimental evidence by appealing to the sleaziest of arguments. They would focus on the weakest pieces of evidence and then generalize from that, which is simply straw man reasoning. The principle on which I operated all along is that the cases that matter from outside the lab have to be the strongest cases, the ones that are the hardest to explain away.”
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Professor at University of Colorado’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering guides students through experiments demonstrating unexplainable psychic phenomena.
With a stellar academic and professional background Dr. Garret Moddel had little to gain by venturing into controversial research on psychic phenomena. But for a professor who long ago tackled quantum engineering cutting edge research comes naturally.
Join Skeptiko host Alex Tsakiris for an interview with University of Colorado engineering professor Dr, Garret Moddel. During the 40-minute interview Dr. Moddel describes the challenges of bringing controversial research into the classroom, “I spent most of my career doing essentially quantum engineering, which is engineering little devices based upon quantum mechanical principles. Then about ten years ago on Sabbatical, I got in contact by accident with a physicist who had a library full of books on the science of psychic phenomena. I was absolutely blown away. I couldn’t believe what I saw. I ended up spending the whole Sabbatical going through his library. After that, I was convinced that this is really where the new science and revolutionary ideas are going to come from, so I still continue my mainstream research and most of my colleagues don’t know about my psi phenomena research, although it is on my website. I think they choose not to know.”
Dr. Moddel’s students learn about the science behind these strange phenomena and prove to themselves that they exist, “the course goes through the history of psi research and we use different textbooks depending on the time. Right now the two textbooks that I’m using are Dean Radin’s Entangled Minds, which is just a wonderful, wonderful book describing psi research and then also Chris Carter’s book on Parapsychology and the Skeptics, which takes a wonderful philosophical view of all of this and puts it in perspective. Then each student or each group of students must carry out an independent psi research project. This has to be high quality research. It’s got to be publishable quality research. Half the grade depends upon it. And they take it quite seriously. They come up with very creative experiments.”
The Society for Scientific Exploration (SSE) is a professional organization of scientists and scholars who study unusual and unexplained phenomena. Subjects often cross mainstream boundaries, such as consciousness, ufos, and alternative medicine, yet often have profound implications for human knowledge and technology.
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Alex Tsakiris: Let me give you some of the highlights from the Curriculum Vitae of today’s guest. Let’s start with electrical engineering degree from Stanford, master’s and PhD in applied physics from Harvard, professor at University of Colorado, former CEO of a venture-backed high technology start-up. And on top of all that, President of the Society for Scientific Exploration.
Renée Scheltema discusses her documentary, Something Unknown Is Doing We Don’t Know What. Motivated to explain her curious psychic experiences, documentary filmmaker Renée Scheltema decided to set out to the US and meet with the top researchers in parapsychology.
She found how science is verifying numerous kinds of connections : ‘mind to mind’ ; ‘mind to body’ and ‘mind to world’, demonstrating that psychic abilities are part of our inherent nature.
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Faced with choosing a prominent figure for his Science and Society Masters dissertation, Phillip Stevens avoided the obvious. Instead of Kepler, Newton, or Darwin, Stevens chose controversial British biologist, and Perrott-Warrick Scholar, Dr. Rupert Sheldrake. “I’d known about Rupert Sheldrake and I found him very interesting”, Phillips said.
Although skeptical of Sheldrake’s theories, Phillips focused on how Sheldrake was being judged, “I wanted to be impartial as to whether he was right or wrong and instead go on and look at whether he’d been treated fairly.”
What he discovered surprised him. Stevens found that despite an unblemished academic record and a research fellowship at the Royal Society, Sheldrake faced public scorn from colleagues for publishing his theory of morphic fields which suggests a living, developing universe with its own inherent memory. “There was a review in the journal, Nature in which the editor, John Maddox said that the book, A New Science of Life, should be burned”, Stevens said. “You’d think that that sort of attitude towards what was just a theory would be out of date and would be seen as you know, unscientific. But in fact, it damaged Sheldrake’s career, not John Maddox’s career.”
But the biggest surprise came when Stevens looked at Sheldrake’s collaboration with skeptics like Dr. Richard Wiseman. According to Stevens Wiseman failed to follow normal procedures scientists use when collaborating and reporting their results.
“Wiseman actually did repeats of Sheldrake’s results. He never denied this, but he only admitted it, I think, ten years later. I mean, in normal experiments, if you repeat someone’s results, you say it. And there didn’t seem to be any reason for him not to say, ‘I’ve repeated his results. These experiments work. Sheldrake wasn’t wrong.’ And you know what? Sheldrake was a Research Fellow at the Royal Society. I would hope that when he has some experiments and tests things he’d get it right because he’s from one of the best institutions of science in Britain and in the world. So I really don’t know why Wiseman took so long just to say, ‘Yes, the patterns in Sheldrake’s works were repeated in my own.’”, said Stevens.
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Alex Tsakiris: Welcome to Skeptiko where we explore controversial science with leading researchers, thinkers, and their critics. I’m your host, Alex Tsakiris, and on this episode of Skeptiko we’re going to talk about science and skepticism. You know, a few months ago I received an e-mail from a gentleman in the UK who was completing his master’s dissertation on the philosophy of science. He had chosen Rupert Sheldrake as the person that he was going to profile as part of his dissertation. I had done a couple of interviews with Dr. Sheldrake, as well as delved into the research that he had done with skeptic Richard Wiseman, who’s a professor in the UK as well.
Research into controversial topics like psychic mediums is tough, but some researchers find it’s made even tougher when skeptics favor the weakest cases over the strongest.
With a stellar academic and professional background Dr. Garret Moddel had little to gain by venturing into controversial research on psychic phenomena. But for a professor who long ago tackled quantum engineering cutting edge research comes naturally.
Faced with choosing a prominent figure for his Science and Society Masters dissertation, Phillip Stevens avoided the obvious. Instead of Kepler, Newton, or Darwin, Stevens chose controversial British biologist, and Perrott-Warrick Scholar, Dr. Rupert Sheldrake. “I’d known about 
